Post Tagged with: Travel

HAVANA, SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 — “I’m not a big fan of Fidel,” our guide Jorge* says. We have known him for less than ten minutes. The driver, who speaks little English, nods approvingly. “His name is Fidel, too” says Jorge, patting the driver on the back. “This is the good Fidel.”

The first assumption I had about Cuba was shattered. I had assumed the people would be reticent to discuss their feelings about the regime, the party, or their leader. They were not. Almost all the Cubans we met were all too eager to relate their stories of living under the regime, in the past and in the present. Those that weren’t explicit spoke about Castro the way that a coworker might diplomatically criticize an underperforming boss. Our questions were often answered as if no other explanation were necessary: “Es Cuba.”

Es Cuba indeed. From the moment we landed in Havana the day before, direct from Panama City, it was immediately apparent we were not in Kansas anymore. The airport is an exemplar of Soviet-era architecture with brutalist concrete pylons, stretches of burnt orange tiles and adornments and long hallways with low ceilings and dim lighting. Where other airports might offer shop after shop of bookstores, coffee shops and restaurants, the Havana airport shops only have an abundance of certain items we will see many times: foreign candy imports, tobacco, tourist paraphernalia, and alcohol. Everything else is scarce, including food, water, soft drinks, snacks, magazines, books, toiletries, and medicine, none of which can be found. In the restroom, only half of the toilets have toilet seats, and there is a conspicuous lack of soap in the dispensers, no paper towels, and non-functioning hand dryers. To suddenly find ourselves in a place with plenty of cigarettes but no soap was a jarring experience, and it would not be our last.

“Fast Food” at the airport–so fast you can’t see it.

Upon arriving, our first task was to change our money. The local currency is two currencies. The convertible peso (CUC) functions as their hard currency—roughly 1:1 with the dollar—and is the only Cuban peso that trades for foreign currencies. Cuban pesos (CUP) are what the government spends, and are accepted at state-owned businesses, which until recently were all businesses. Not surprisingly, Cubans prefer to transact in CUC, and as we understand, they associate the two currencies with two different conceptions of quality. A “CUC place” will invariably deliver higher value, whereas a “peso place” is a euphemism for a shoddy, cheap, state-run service. It didn’t take us long to figure out that CUC was not only the currency of the tourist economy, but of the fledgling private economy as well, as some businesses who only cater to locals will still accept CUCs. As we will find out, more and more Cubans are breaking into this CUC economy and entering an emerging middle class with disposable income.

Upon leaving the airport the first thing to strike us was the cars. We felt immediately thrown back to a movie from classic Hollywood, complete with a lineup of 1950’s luxury automobile brands: Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, DeSoto, and Ford. And of course, there was an array of Soviet-era utility cars from Lada and the like. The few modern cars scattered about stuck out painfully. We also could see quite a few 1990’s-era European cars: Volkswagens, Peugeots, and so on. It was quite the hodgepodge.

Cuba’s car economy is unique in the world, a natural outcome of a state-run economy that only provides rationed cars to the political elite and some of those in select professions (like doctors), and has no legitimate market in automobiles. We find out later that the black market value of a new car is north of $260,000 and can be as high as $700,000 (that’s US dollars). The worst used car can be got for $7,000. It’s not surprising that Cubans value their cars above all else, which has translated to the plethora of 1950’s American cars on the roads, missing seatbelts, poor gas mileage and all. These are cars that have been preserved far beyond their natural lives and the age shows on most of them: from gutted interiors, non-functioning door handles, nubs where the window cranks used to be, rusted frames, cracked fenders, sputtering engines, creaking gears, torn and faded original leather seats, cracked paint, and every other car malady imaginable. Frequently we see a local car owner performing repairs, with the car jacked up, hood splayed open and parts strewn over the sidewalk. I would not be surprised if most Cubans are better mechanics than most mechanics anywhere else in the world.

A pretty typical scene in Old Havana. Lots of old cars everywhere you look.

Cars have also transformed into a new business opportunity in the last couple years, as Raúl Castro’s government has relaxed controls on transportation enterprises, in addition to restaurants and hotels. Many of the cars we see have been restored to their former glory, down to new paint jobs, new stereo systems, air conditioning and modern engines swapped in. We find out that a driver of these retrofitted old cars can make up to $50 per hour from tourists, not bad for a country whose average monthly salary is $23.

Retrofitted convertibles waiting for fares.

We spent our first day exploring our neighborhood, Vedado, which we will later find out is the most modern and one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Havana. It’s hard to believe it. Many houses on our street would be considered condemned by the standards of any major American city. Those that aren’t abandoned outright are in late stages of decay, held together by decades of do-it-yourself fixes we see Cubans performing constantly. It’s common to see lead paint peeling, door and window frames warping, and exposed concrete, rust and wiring. Many of these houses are former mansions stripped of their pre-revolution glory, overgrown with weeds, foundations literally crumbling before our eyes. It’s hard to believe there are people living in the crevices of these stone ruins, but we see them through windowless window frames. Some of these houses are completely gutted, down to the studs, or collapsed altogether.

Vedado was lively with activity: children coming home from school, parents and babies, cats and dogs wandering about, men pushing hand carts with construction supplies, women carrying bags from the fruit market down the street. We rented an Airbnb (recently allowed to operate in Cuba) whose owner has renovated half of her house for guests, which in turn is the top floor of a pre-revolution duplex. The bottom floor looks abandoned with its doorless entryways and unlit interior, but is occupied.

Grand old house in Vedado.

We walked to the Meliá Cohiba, a luxury hotel on the seaside Malecón esplanade, taking in its tacky oversized marble lobby (it actually reminded me a lot of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City). Meliá Cohiba is state-owned, along with the glorious old hotels and nightclubs of the past: Hotel Nacional, Hotel Parque Central, the Tropicana, the Floridita. These were hotels and clubs once owned and frequented by American millionaires and mobsters, the center of a thriving and prosperous economy which brought celebrities, artists, writers, wanderers, sunbathers and entrepreneurs to these sunny shores. When Castro took over in 1958, the state nationalized all of these tourist destinations. Today, they are shadows of their former glory, sharing many of the same misfortunes as the houses and mansions we saw.

One gets the sense that Havana has been lost in time, frozen in 1958 at the dawn of the most successful half-century in world history. The rest of the world has seen largely peace, prosperity, global trade, new technologies, the internet, cheap travel, a renaissance of architecture and music and literature, an explosion of democracy and expression, the shattering of international borders, economic stability and a new world order based in theory if not always in practice on human rights and dignity. Cuba just introduced heavily censored 56k dial-up internet, only available to the political elite and tourists, with some slow hotspots to the public available as of 2015. SMS still does not work for locals.**

Old Havana street; late afternoon.

In Europe and America, we speak of “prewar” and “postwar.” These wars are often the defining moments in our history across which so much changed they create two distinct periods with different moods, politics, economies, social orders, and realities. In Cuba, the moment that matters most is the moment when Castro, Che and their ragtag band of Marxist revolutionaries upended the Batista dictatorship and marched, guns blazing, into the presidential palace. From that moment on, every Cuban speaks of “pre-revolution” as if it were an era lost forever.

* * *

It is Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución we find ourselves with our new friend Jorge.

As any student of Communism will tell you, the Revolution never ends. It is critical to the policies of the regime that there is always a capitalist enemy to defeat. Legitimacy is achieved by representing the upending of a social and economic order where the elite control the means of production, to one where the people do through nationalization. Of course, once nationalized, the economy becomes taken over by a new elite whose methods of control are even more violent and regressive. That is why the Revolution must never end—because if a status quo of unilateral power becomes established, it invites a new revolution based on the same principles. This is why the Cuban constitution states, for example, that “artistic creativity is free as long as its content is not contrary to the Revolution.”

Old car repairs–a common sight on Havana streets.

That is also why, for 54 years until he handed the reigns of power to his brother, Fidel Castro lectured on the ongoing revolution and its benefits to crowds of millions in this very revolutionary square. It is a brutal place, the size of two football fields paved entirely in white concrete baking under the Caribbean sun. Portraits of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos are displayed on government buildings surrounding the square, with an imposing memorial to Cuban national hero José Martí keeping watch from the center. Images of Fidel and Raúl Castro are not displayed, apparently because of a Cuban law that prevents public iconography of living revolutionaries (interestingly different from the norm in Mao’s China and Kim’s Korea).

Jorge is telling us about Fidel Castro’s 4- to 6-hour political rallies at this square, which would be broadcast on every television channel. “Everyone in Cuba watched it,” Jorge says, “Because we didn’t know how long the speeches would last, and the soap operas would come on afterwards.” We laughed. He continues. “We would keep the volume down so that Castro would become background noise. When he said ‘¡Patria o Muerte, Venceremos!’ [homeland or death, we will overcome], that’s when we turned up the volume. That’s when we knew the speech was almost over.”

A Lada taxi rumbles past an apartment building; central Havana.

Jorge is, like many Cubans we will meet, a multi-entrepreneur who has active businesses giving tours, selling cigars, teaching English and French, and helping Cubans with their immigration paperwork, all under the table of course. That’s the way the economy operates here. On our walk through Havana, we see street vendors selling tortillas, bananas, ice cream, makeshift barber shops and beauty salons in the empty shells of former houses, makeshift restaurants (paladars) and bars serving food and beer off of porches. In the last couple years, many of these businesses have been allowed to start operating legally; previously, they were all underground. Jorge explains to us that the official salaries offered by the government for services—such as driving garbage trucks—are laughably small, so almost everyone with an official job will have several jobs on the side. Those garbage truckers, for example, will siphon the valuable fuel left over from their routes and sell it on the black market, where customers will pay half of what they would pay for gas from the state-owned gas stations. And of course, Jorge is telling us this as we drive around in a car operated by Fidel, another entrepreneur whose beat-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air makes him far more money than he would make operating a state-owned, air conditioned, brand spanking new yellow taxi.

To give us a sense of just how low official salaries are, Jorge tells us that last year, the government raised the salary of doctors to $50 per month, after sending 4,500 doctors to Brazil to help with a medical crisis in 2014 and having many of them never return. It’s not surprising that even doctors in this economy look for any opportunity to make ends meet. Jorge’s doctor, we find out, sells Jorge his extra phone line for $60 per month so Jorge has access to 56k dialup internet (internet in private homes is currently illegal). Another doctor we hear about sells bootlegged movies from his bicycle to scrape together more cash. And they must, because they cannot afford to do otherwise. Monthly rations of rice and beans provided by the government amount to only one week’s worth of food. That means the other three weeks the people are forced to fend for themselves. It’s no surprise that enterprise has flourished underground, in the most unlikely places. Cuba might have more entrepreneurs per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Tourist market, by the wharf.

Jorge and Fidel took us around the city to point out more Havana peculiarities, including “Coney Island,” which despite its name is more of a small-ball kiddie park like you would find in an underwhelming tourist town. We saw the classic nightclubs of prohibition-era Havana, now all but abandoned, and the ex-Soviet, now Russian, embassy, which squats imposingly and palatially across several square blocks, epitomizing the concrete brutalist architecture of that era. And we drove past the estate of Fidel Castro, completely hidden behind overgrown brush, but bigger than anything we had seen so far.

We went for lunch at a CUC restaurant in Old Havana. The recently opened restaurant, Jorge explained, was funded by American capital, most likely through a family member as only Cubans can own property here. As a private business, this restaurant must provide better service and quality in order to stay afloat, something Jorge reminded us of after coming back from the bathroom. “This is the first year restaurants have had clean toilets in Cuba” he said matter of factly, and proudly. “They even have toilet paper.”

A brand new private ice cream shop in the old town. Delicious.

When a country is deprived of so much, so little becomes luxury. We are reminded of this constantly. Jorge needs to take one aspirin per day for a medical condition. He hasn’t had any in three months. It can’t be found (we gave him ours). We spent the meal getting a history lesson.

As Jorge explains it—and like everything else in this country, his view must be taken with a grain of salt—Batista was a petty dictator with a corruption streak who got caught in a Marxist fervor sweeping Latin America in the postwar period. He gave up with barely a fight, fled to Spain with $42 million in a suitcase and left the country to be taken over by Castro and his thugs. It became apparent very quickly that overthrowing one dictatorship does not mean another dictatorship won’t displace it, and Castro immediately went about practicing the normal Marxist playbook: seizing billions of dollars of private property, nationalizing all industries, and implementing the trifecta of communist control: stifling of dissent, rationing of all goods and services, and monopolizing of all labor. It didn’t take long for the best and brightest of Cuba to be driven underground and, if they were lucky, to flee to America, Mexico, and elsewhere, leaving behind an empty legacy of wealth: buildings and goods with no human capital behind them.

Typical street in Old Havana. Prime real estate, too.

As Jorge takes us for a walk through Old Havana, a mountain of salt wouldn’t hide what we can plainly see. Early 20th century condominium and apartment buildings in disrepair. Entire blocks of pre-revolution townhouses in ruins. Street after street of potholes, rusted fences, graffiti, peeled paint, uneven sidewalks ripped up by tree roots, crumbling concrete facades, abandoned shops, restaurants, movie theaters, boarded up doors, broken windows. What were once beautiful facades and lively pedestrian streets are caked in layers of filth and grime and dirt. The smells of exposed food, cigar smoke, sewage, rotting trash, and burning diesel all mix in a powerful cloud of odor wafting around every corner.

It could be a war zone. But it’s not—it’s merely the result of decades of neglect, imposed upon a country by a man whose face is plastered on every official poster and whose accomplices adorn t-shirts in every tourist shop. It’s the expected consequence of a state-owned economy that prevents Cubans from providing basic needs for each other.

Typical paladar in Old Havana.

I have many times been in a developing country. Never have I been in a de-developed country.

There is something uniquely sad about Cuba. Unlike other poor countries in the Caribbean, Cuba had everything, and it was turned into a trash heap of human and material misery. The people who did it have not been held responsible; in fact, they’re still in power. And the people who have suffered for decades have been robbed of their wealth, their human capital, and worst of all, their time. “You can’t get time back” Jorge sighs. “We lost 58 years. We went backwards in time. And the saddest thing for me,” he says, “is the potential we could have had.”

* * *

We met Daniel the next day, through a mutual friend. Daniel speaks no English but was happy to be our driver and guide for the day. We left at 7:30 in the morning and before long we were bumping down the pothole-ridden highway to Pinar Del Río, the western tobacco-growing region where many of Cuba’s legendary cigars are cultivated and rolled.

On the two hour trip, we had plenty of experience with the countryside. Hitchhikers were everywhere. It turns out that, unsurprisingly, any semblance of public transportation in the country is broken. In the cities, people can wait up to 3 hours for a bus, whereas in the country city-to-city transport is nonexistent. Since a car is a luxury most Cubans can’t afford, they’ve adapted their own ‘sharing economy’ where all cars offer ride shares for a price, as well as private busses which are essentially pickup trucks and vans whose drivers will sell rides.

Woman buying tortillas from a street vendor. Like much of the commerce in Cuba, makeshift and likely black market.

There’s only one main highway in Cuba (it’s a long and narrow country), and on this particular stretch of road, we encountered only one gas station/rest stop about halfway. Some prepared food was offered here—nothing we could eat—but they were out of many items. Long cabinets with a smattering of baked goods were mostly empty. Some foreign imports were available though—candy, chocolate and the like—so we were able to stock up on ‘food.’ We had started noticing a pattern where stores would have an abundance of some types of goods and a shortage of others. This shouldn’t be surprising for any student of economics.

In Cuba, in cases where the official price of a good is lower than market value—for example cars, public transportation and most food—scarcity and rationing are the norm and long lines form when no other options are available. We have seen lines for all kinds of goods including bread, medicine, and ice cream. One woman we met, Rosa, has to wait more than a year to see a doctor for her condition, and she still has no idea how serious it is.

Where’s the meter for the horse cart? A common sighting in Pinar del Río.

Where private enterprise is not allowed, a black market has emerged to offer higher prices but guaranteed availability across a suite of goods and services. The gas station we were at was state owned, so there was a shortage of most of the food on offer. Of course we didn’t know how to access the black market in this area, but one undoubtedly exists.

In those cases where the government price sits above market value—for example with taxi fares, hotel rates, tobacco and alcohol—other private enterprises and black markets have developed to deliver equal quality goods at a fraction of the cost. There will also be, as expected, an abundance of these goods in state run stores, as there was at the airport, and in this gas station. There was no problem here getting candy, chocolate, alcohol and tobacco, although right now we only wanted the first two.

We drove through Pinar del Río which seemed to be doing pretty well. Perhaps there were fewer pre-revolutionary buildings and materiel to notice relative decay. In any event, a communist government may end up supporting the people in the countryside better than those in the city. We saw a lot more revolutionary advertisements in the country, more statues of party leaders, more proclamations. We also saw more lines for food. So it’s hard to tell whether rural support for the regime is actually higher, or whether, perhaps, the country is favored by the regime because of the necessity for food only the country provides, and tobacco which is such a critical state-owned industry. In any event, it was important to see another side of Cuban life, where Castro and his allies may not be universally despised.

All gas stations are state owned. It’s rare to see people filling up; the car at the pump has government plates.

One thing we did see in the country that I haven’t seen since my time in post-Soviet Romania: horse-drawn carriages have replaced cars for much of rural Cubans’ industry and transit. That was astounding to me—whereas Havana has regressed to the 1950’s, the countryside has regressed to the dawn of the automobile.

At the first tobacco plantation we visited, we met Nardo. Like Jorge, Nardo taught himself English from American TV shows and music, supplemented by paying a private tutor. When I asked him if he learned any English in school, he shook his head and answered: “School is free here. You pay for nothing, you get nothing in return.” It was interesting to get Nardo’s perspective, as someone who interacts frequently with foreign tourists but also grew up in the countryside where access to foreign capital is limited. I asked him if he thought American tourists would be good for the country, and he said “It will be good, but it won’t change anything about the country.”

One of my assumptions about Cuba before coming here was that the people would blame America for their misfortune. As it turned out, quite the opposite was the case. Not only do the people love America and Americans, but signs of American fandom are everywhere. Flags adorning windshields and coffee shops. American flag t-shirts and tank tops. This is not just for our benefit. Many Cubans have relatives in the US and unsurprisingly there has always been a close unofficial relationship between the two countries. Americans send over $2 billion every year to Cuba, person to person, making America perhaps the largest subsidizer of the Cuban people, who depend on that money to survive. One worker at the plantation, when I admired his brand new leather shoes, smiled and said “de mi familia en Miami.”

One of the boys didn’t want to take a picture. In central Havana.

We learned that Cubans long ago realized that Castro’s long-standing scapegoating of the American embargo*** for the poverty in the country was a tactic to justify his own incompetence, much in the same vein as Hugo Chávez. It turns out that when a government says something is true over and over again, and the evidence in front of their eyes says otherwise, people tend to believe the evidence over the rhetoric. When Obama came to visit post-revolution Cuba—a first for American presidents—Cubans celebrated for weeks and lined the roads on his arrival route, waving American flags. It probably isn’t a thrill to the Cuban government that Fidel and Raúl Castro are half as popular as Obama amongst Cubans according to a 2015 poll, enough so that Fidel published a lengthy editorial slamming Obama after his visit.

Of course Cuba’s misery is the fault of Cuban government policies. Cuba has been cut off from American tourists and capital and products for the last 56 years, but it has had the ability to trade with almost every other country in the world. Of course there is no way that a well functioning economy with trade routes to the outside world would suffer because of one trade embargo with one country, when all goods Cubans could possibly want are available from many other countries as well. The evidence is all around—there are non-American brands for every major product here, from cars to candy to retail to alcohol to hotels. Cuba is not suffering because it doesn’t have access to US products and capital. Cuba is suffering because every import is controlled by the state and those controls lead to misappropriation, inefficiency, shortage and graft, when such imports are allowed in the first place.

America bling everywhere.

However, it is unsurprising to me, at least, that the relaxation of the American embargo is coinciding with the letting up of price controls and restrictions on free enterprise here. I suspect that Raúl Castro and company know that it’s only a matter of time before free markets emerge in Cuba, and the only way to retain legitimacy through the transition is to take charge of the change. If the embargo, the justification for misery, is lifted around the time when free enterprise and free flow of capital is allowed back into the country, Castro can continue to tell the biggest lie his government tells while guiding the country away from state-owned industry.

That’s all speculation of course. But when I asked Nardo about whether the lifting of restrictions on free enterprise in the last couple years has been good for the country, he said “Yes, for some people. And that’s good enough for the government.” From the countryside, it must be hard to see the all-too-slow dismantling of this failed and broken system from a distance. The government can’t let up too quickly, or it delegitimizes itself.

In the state-owned tobacco industry, planters like Nardo are allowed to sell 10% of their crop privately while the government buys 90% at a fixed price. The 10% goes for much more on the private market, where it is turned into cigars for consumption at even lower prices than the government charges for finished cigars. Where the massive spread goes between what the government pays for tobacco and what it sells cigars for, I wasn’t able to suss out, but I suspect it has something to do with the size of Fidel Castro’s mansion and the $260k new cars driving around the city with government plates.

Old Havana street.

Until a couple years ago, planters like Nando had to ‘sell’ 100% of their crop to the government, but the new rules have allowed for some limited maneuvering. That ultimately will be a good thing for the farm economy, and seems to have already made a difference. Jorge told us that until a couple years ago even common fruits like mangoes, papaya, and pineapple were not to be found on any market, for any price. He also told us there are some fruits he still hasn’t seen in more than 20 years.

We learned a lot about the condition of agriculture in Cuba. Before the revolution, Cuba was a world famous exporter of mangoes, sugar cane, coffee and tobacco, among other tropical fruits. When Castro took over—again, not surprising to students of communism—he mismanaged the farmland into the ground, literally. At one point, according to Jorge, he razed thousands of hectares of lush orchards to make room for cattle grazing. And yet, according to the Economist, “in a place that before 1959 boasted as many cattle as people, meat is such a scarce luxury that it is a crime to kill and eat a cow.” Years later, as we drive down the highway, we see miles and miles of barren land. Right now, Cuba imports over 70% of its agricultural consumption.

As a result of the revolution, the best planters and rollers moved abroad to other tropical countries like Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. This has resulted in other cigars catching up to Cubans on quality. Fortunately, unlike with coffee and mangoes, Cuba has retained its reputation for the best cigars in the world. But it isn’t hard to see how stifled the industry has become since coming under state control. For instance, despite there being a near infinite combination of cigar varietals that can be created by combining different species and fermentations of tobacco in different ways, only a handful of official state brands of cigars are permitted to be sold. So the creativity of the planters and rollers in coming up with new cigars is lost, for now, to the global market. But they certainly enjoy inventing new kinds of cigars for themselves.

Highway watermelon “store.” $1 per melon.

Daniel drove us back to Havana, on the way stopping for watermelons on the side of the road: $1 per melon. These makeshift enterprises are how most Cubans get by. He hid the watermelons below the floor of his trunk, with the spare tire. He wasn’t taking his chances with the checkpoints; on the way west, we had passed a random inspection, as officials are always looking for people smuggling food. Daniel wasn’t taking any chances that his watermelons would be confiscated or he would be fined or worse, imprisoned. He has two kids to feed.

If there was ever an example of the brutality of a Marxist regime, this was it. That one can’t even carry fruit without committing a crime—that the crime is betraying the revolution, not preventing people from feeding themselves—is too much to bear. Cuba has made its population criminal because they want things that improve and sustain life. It should not be a crime to want these things, but here it is a crime. “Crime is different here,” Jorge had told us. “We are all criminals in Cuba.”

* * *

When I told people I was going to Cuba, the reaction was predictable. I was told I was lucky to witness Cuba because it was “untouched.” I was told something along the lines of: “Oh, you get to see Cuba before Starbucks and McDonald’s go down and ruin it all.” I heard the same thing from some Americans I met at El Floridita. I confess part of me shared in this naive romanticism about Cuba, that somehow there is a ‘purity’ to Cuba that will soon be ‘corrupted.’ I was wrong about this. Not only because of my naiveté about the condition on the ground in Cuba, but because of the insidiousness such a belief implies about what the Cuban people want and deserve.

“Untouched” is a romantic way to look at the poverty that Cuba has become. There is nothing romantic about poverty. Poverty is sad. Poverty is sick children and malnourishment. Poverty is no books or school supplies. Poverty is no toilet paper, no soap, no toothpaste, no clean water, and unmet basic needs. Poverty is constant exposure to punishing heat and humidity. Poverty is torn up shoes and broken cars. Poverty is dangerous tools and equipment. Worst of all, poverty is wasted human capital: time spent waiting on lines for food instead of producing goods and services to better society. Poverty is unwritten literature, unsung music, unconducted experiments, undiscovered breakthroughs, and unfulfilled ambition.

Apartment building in decay; central Havana.

There is nothing pure about revolutionary Cuba. The Cuba of Fidel and Raúl Castro is a wasteland of broken people and broken dreams. For 58 years, Fidel Castro has bled the wealth of this country dry intentionally, prepared to let his people die rather than acknowledge the inadequacy of his broken political ideology. We know this firsthand now, since we have actually met people who lived through it. We met one Cuban who worked in a graveyard in the 1990s, the decade Cubans refer to as the “Special Period.” It was in the haze of post-Soviet collapse that Castro refused to allow foreign imports and, of course, with local production at miserable lows, it didn’t take long for people to start starving. Rather than betray the principles of the Revolution, Castro was preparing teams of body collectors to tour Havana and haul the dead back to the graveyard to be buried in mass graves. That is the legacy of making a country poor, and the wounds won’t be healed for decades after the regime is out of power.

Of course, the Revolution needs to keep people poor, because poor people can’t fight back. Poor people can’t afford to agitate. Poor people need to keep showing up to their jobs to collect their pitiful paychecks. Poor people need to keep waiting on line for their less-than-subsistence rations to keep from starving. If poor people aren’t allowed to fend for themselves, they must wallow forever. The only thing poor people can do, if they’re lucky, is escape. One woman, Donna, who sells local art, told me, “We love America. I wish we could go there.”

Car comparison: party member vs. regular citizen. The blue striped license indicates the car belongs to a party official or VIP. EDIT: apparently it’s state owned tourism vehicle, not a VIP. Blue just means state owned, but they can come in different varieties. In any event the blue plates are almost always on nicer cars than the white plates. Thanks, commenter.

Wealth is an anecdote. Wealth gives people power to fight back, to challenge the status quo, to create jobs and opportunities, to invest in food and clothing and productive capacities. Cuba needs wealth, and not wealth that goes to the apparatchiks and officials in their $260k cars and mansions. Wealth that actually goes to the people, in the form of jobs, industry, and investment.

The sadness is not that Starbucks is coming to Cuba. The sadness is that Starbucks has never come to Cuba.

The sadness is that no foreign brands have come to Cuba. No Austrian coffee shops, no Japanese dollar stores. We’re finding some limited foreign retail brands, apparently only recently allowed in. But even Coca Cola is hard to come by. These foreign franchises represent jobs, investment, and opportunity for the Cuban people. The Cuban people have been cut off from the world, from not only the cheap high quality goods and services that improve quality of life, but the freedom and the disposable income to improve their own lives and pursue their own happiness.

All-but-abandoned complex in old town Havana.

Starbucks and McDonald’s will not ruin Cuba. Cuba is already ruined. As American tourists, what we wanted—-desperately wanted—is some way we could help the people rebuild. The answer is not lifting the US embargo, although extra American tourist dollars would be good. But if those dollars go immediately to waste, it won’t change the country fundamentally. We heard many times from many people that the system is the problem. They need more liberalization, more private enterprise, more allowance of foreign imports. And that can only happen if Cuban communism goes the way of Chinese and Vietnamese communism: embracing free markets, allowing foreign investment and free capital flows, and letting the people get to work for themselves.

Waiting on line for bread. Central Havana.

And according to Jorge, whose reading on the subject is far better than mine, this won’t happen until the ‘old guard’ of the revolution—Fidel, Raúl and other party leaders, all over 80 years old—are no longer in power. He tells us with a guilty whisper: “We must wait for the biological solution.”

That night, we walked the ramparts of Havana, on the ocean, where just 80 miles over the horizon is Key West, Florida. We mingled with hundreds of local young people who spend their nights looking out into the blackness that in any other country would be thriving with lights from incoming and outgoing ships representing the entirety of the world’s commerce and nations.

* * *

As we toured the old town of Havana, we took in all we could. We shopped at an official tourist market right off the wharf where the cruise ships come in. We discovered gems of old Havana: the church of San Francisco, the old Partagás cigar factory, the capitol building. We had daiquiris with the bronze statue of Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita. We saw one of the oldest cathedrals in the hemisphere.

As we explored the city of Havana, we discovered that the bleakness of Cuba’s past is fast giving way to a prosperous future.

Recently, the regime started allowing private enterprises to operate here on a limited bases. They started with cars, hotels, and restaurants, but opened up over 200 occupations. Now Cubans can become barbers and salon professionals, bus drivers, floor polishers, electricians, and computer programmers as well, all without having to hand over 100% of their work product in exchange for a measly ‘salary.’ Many Cubans can now work for themselves, to the tune of over 20% of the workforce now in the private sector.

Art market on the bay.

Signs of a Cuban renaissance are everywhere. As recently as two years ago, according to friends of mine that visited, there were no restaurants or bars outside of the tightly controlled state-owned hotels. Now, restaurants, hotels, bars, and shops are popping up all over the place, offering better service and sometimes, better prices. We ate at some fantastic new restaurants and were able to patronize private ice cream shops, our private Airbnb, and of course private cars. We visited a new boutique hotel opening soon, completely renovated (although they imported everything, from the tiles to the tables to the business cards, from Italy). People fixing and renovating storefronts and houses, limited advertising on the sides of buildings, a plethora of new businesses servicing tourists in the old town. Music pouring out of every restaurant beckoning people in. We see a fortune teller who charges $200 per reading, 10 times the average Cuban monthly salary, to tourists. She’s probably one of the richest people in the country. This is all new to post-1958 Cuba.

As Nardo told us, these changes are only helping some people for the time being, which makes sense. Only those with money to spend can afford to invest in, and buy products from, non-state owned business. But these businesses create more people with money, and this money forces its way not only into the industries opening up, but the myriad of industries which depend on them. For instance, allowing a private restaurant to operate freely must mean allowing the vendors who provide the restaurant with food, tables and chairs, ovens, deep fryers, kitchen utensils, and uniforms to operate freely as well. Allowing a private barbershop must mean allowing private scissor sellers and shaving cream manufacturers. Not allowing these dependent industries and imports to develop would mean asking businesses, like the people, to circumvent tight controls to acquire the goods and services they need on the black market, which they will do, but at great cost to society.

We were fortunate to be at the home of a local for some drinks when our host took delivery of that week’s paquete, something I had read about and was excited to try firsthand. The paquete is a hard drive smuggled in from the outside world with weekly updates from all major Mexican and US TV shows and soap operas, music, news, sports, software updates and patches, and even iPhone & Android apps. Locals pay $1 to get paquete delivered for a couple hours where they have a chance to download whatever they want. It’s basically a black market for culture and entertainment, and allows Cubans to know everything about the US election, watch Game of Thrones and Netflix shows, stay updated on baseball, and pirate music. We also frequently see Cubans connecting to the internet near state owned hotels where there are slow, but working hotspots, though they have to buy from the state’s internet monopoly and it is heavily censored. Some Cubans we met are even on Facebook. They are able to keep in touch with relatives abroad, which means they are in touch with the outside world.

The only internet available to most Cubans is around hotspots like these next to state-owned hotels. Only 30% of Cubans have some access to the internet, although having internet in a private home is illegal.

So, with economy and society, it’s clear that the floodgates are being forced open. As new businesses flourish, they are creating jobs and a new influx of capital, which will be spent in turn on more goods and services. As Cubans get connected to the outside world more and more, they are able to access cultural capital abroad, as well as foreign markets and international trade partners. This will create new business opportunities. Cuba is starting to emerge again.

That night, we dined at La Catedral, a new restaurant in Vedado, where we were the only foreigners. Two young musicians, whom I had a chance to talk to about their budding musical careers, played jazz standards on piano and violin they had taught themselves. The mood was upbeat and one could easily think we were in a Argentinian bistro. The place was packed with local Cubans, enjoying a night out, probably aware that they are at the forefront of a new revolution in Cuba. For a moment it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the rest of the country can rejoin the world.

* * *

The only museum we visited was the Museo de la Revolutión. There, we were spoon-fed details of the brutality of the Batista regime and the noble heroes who overthrew it. We met the young, handsome revolutionary leaders who, full of optimism and certainty about their ideology, sought to bring the world forward by creating a Marxist utopia. We learned about the evil of the US embargo and how it has brought untold suffering on the Cuban people. We learned that the Revolution will last forever.

One can’t help but think about Orwell when confronted with such stone faced hypocrisy and deceit. His vision of the dystopian world of 1984 is eerily prescient here; a place where war is constant, where truth is fiction and history is erased. Where Fidel, the man himself, is incapacitated, and yet is still invoked as the moral authority of the nation and its prime political and ideological figurehead.

History crushes you here. We are walking amongst the carcass of Marxism-Leninism, 26 years after most of the world has abandoned this folly. Only in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and a few other holdouts do people have to suffer this way any more.

Busy old town sidewalk.

You get the sense that politics, society, economy and history are all intertwined and the forces that have shaped this country and others like it are human and inhuman at the same time—human because they come from a profound sense of responsibility and desire to do good, inhuman because they result in so much evil and destruction of human lives and potential.

As we wandered the streets of Havana, our helplessness was overwhelming, not only out of our desire to want to better the condition of the people around us, but out of our shared experience, if even briefly, with what Cubans go through every day in even worse circumstances. There is a conspicuous lack of basic services found in abundance elsewhere. Grocery stores are a rarity; we only found two and they lacked fresh produce, household items, and any non-prepared foods. There are no bodegas or quick marts or soda fountains. Pharmacies are few and far between with little supply, only available rationed to those with permission. Even if I wanted, I don’t know where I would find toothpaste or toilet paper. The ability to pay a fair a cheap price for something I want, like a bottle of water or an apple, isn’t widely available, even to people with money. It is surreal to be in a place where dollars didn’t demand immediate service. Even in the poorest countries I’ve been to, markets are allowed to exist that provide these services.

Abandoned bar, maybe soon to be revitalized? Prime real estate in old town Havana.

All the while we were keenly aware of the luxuries that only we as tourists could afford. Air conditioned rooms to escape the punishing heat and humidity. Limited and slow access to wifi on occasion. Access to the international cell phone network–a real connection with the outside world even at $2.99/minute. If we are the most privileged in the country with foreign capital and currency, what hardships must normal Cubans endure?

If there were ever a doubt about the morality of markets over their criminalization, Cuba would be it. Markets are moral because they provide services and solve problems. They derive their morality from the fair exchange in value created, from the voluntary nature of every transaction. Certainly if markets were evil, as the revolutionary laws would have you believe, people would not risk life and limb to engage in them. There wouldn’t be a broad spirit of cooperation and subversion from the people to circumvent the laws to get what they need. People wouldn’t risk their lives sailing makeshift rafts to Florida or lining up at border crossings across South America.

Makeshift parking lot for jitneys in the old town.

Where is the morality of taking food away from people at highway checkpoints, of banning foreign investment and imports, in forcing people to work for meager wages and insufficient rations? Where is the morality of making medicine impossible to find, food impossible to procure, cars impossible to afford? What insanity allows such a system to stay alive for so long, and what must the Cuban people suffer before it is undone?

We spent our final night with Jorge in his flat. He and his wife are the face of the new Cuba. Born in the 50’s, their whole lives have been spent in the shadow of the revolution, but now they are bursting at the seams. As Cuba opens up and relaxes its policies, entrepreneurs like Jorge will lead the charge, providing tourists and locals services that will create wealth for him and his family, as well as well paying jobs and wealth for others.

Dinner was a panoply of local Cuban specialties, which have been scraped together from various sources: carrots and rice from rations, mangoes and pineapples from the local market (remember: these fruits are newly available in the last couple years), and homemade pancakes made from shaved root vegetables and spices. And we had fish, a real luxury, which we were appreciative they provided for us.

Over rum and cigars, we discussed politics, history, and of course, Cuba, with Jorge. He is well read by any standard. His bookshelf has hundreds of books, a full examination of political economy across Europe, Asia, and of course the Americas, with a focus on the history of war and totalitarianism of all stripes, including religious fundamentalism. He has the Black Book of Communism, books on North Korea, and many other banned works—all smuggled in by friends and entrepreneurs catering to a population hungry to read everything they can.

Jorge is, of course, everything that is contrary to the principles of Cuban revolutionaries, which is what made him such a fast friend: educated, self-employed, entrepreneurial, well read in liberal ideas, aware of what’s happening in the world despite the censorship, one of the few Cubans with internet in his own home thanks to a back alley deal with his doctor. I couldn’t help but thinking that our entire conversation, if recorded or reported on, would land him in prison immediately. He had no problem openly discussing Fidel, explaining to us that the real risk is taking a public stance. Protesting, which happens occasionally, is treated harshly, and results in no change.

The one grocery store we found. It was impressive to see so much food in one place.

We spoke freely and openly about the injustices that have been brought upon his people, soaking in the lessons to be learned from history about the futility of the very ideology considered sacrosanct by the leaders of his country. “To think that we have all suffered for 50 years,” Jorge said, “All because of a man in a funny hat and a funny beard, thinking he knows the answer to everything.” And he’s right.

This family is, or will soon become, part of the nouveau riche of Havana, thanks to the enterprising Jorge and his ambition. But even with money to spend, they struggle to get the things they need, which means wealth that wants to find new owners is struggling to break through. The toilet seat, we found out, was just purchased, after weeks of searching for one. Our “napkins” came from a Russian-branded packet of tissues. Our wine was a cheap bottled sangria from the state market. We couldn’t help compare this last meal with our first dinner, at a restaurant owned by a “friend of the party” whose family still lives in the 8-bedroom, 5-bathroom house on the property. After that dinner, we took a tour of the 1930’s mansion, and were proudly shown their Baccarat crystal chandelier. Comparing the party member who has built nothing with a $5,000 chandelier to the productive, hard working family with no real napkins is enough to make your blood boil. These are the fires that real revolutions are made of. The Cubans have it, and they practice their subversion quietly, but one day the full force of Cuban potential will be unleashed on the country, and the world.

Prime real estate, right next to the capitol building.

Take a mint condition 1950’s Cadillac. Drive it off the lot. Drive it to and from work for 50 years. Getting a new car isn’t an option. When it breaks, the owner must repair it out of pocket with improvised parts. New parts aren’t allowed. As the car gets louder, rustier, dirtier, and less reliable, depend on the charity of your friends to help repair it to keep it going. Eventually every part of the engine has been replaced. Limping along on hacked together fixes and the help of others, the car breaks down slowly over time, but thanks to the quality of manufacture, long shelf life of its fundamentals, and care of the driver, the car still putters along, though it can’t last forever.

So it is with a country. A country that represented the best if its time, the envy of the Caribbean, a jewel of prosperity and productivity and culture and music and history. This is the country that continues to limp along, engine sputtering, but with a strong engine and a good driver—it just needs to be let free. Let the Cuban people onto the open road, and it will be a marvel to witness.

* * *

Now that I am safely on American soil, after spending the week swimming in Orwell, I’m only now starting to think about what Americans can learn from Cuba.

Aside from the obvious, as in: don’t run a country based on the misguided theories of a 19th century Hegelian with no real world experience in economics. I can’t imagine that even the die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters want a state run economy; they just want to see a democratic socialism like in Europe, where economic perversions are democratically imposed and thus carry more legitimacy. Fine. Our mountain of unnecessary regulations and price fixing and tariffs aside, America isn’t going the way of Cuba any time soon.

One lesson that Cubans can teach us is something they understand intuitively; that the line between a job and a business is blurred to nonexistent; the skills are offered for cash each way and the important distinction is whether one is free to trade labor for a price acceptable to both sides, or forced to work for less than subsistence wages because the government is the only employer. When we were told, proudly, that “a private business means that a person works for themselves, and the government can’t make them go down to the revolutionary square to cheer on the party,” that’s what we’re being told—that working for oneself is sacrosanct. It not only is a bulwark against poverty, it’s a bulwark against totalitarianism as well. The best weapon against tyranny is wealth. Not Bill Gates wealth, but “being able to feed one’s own family” wealth—a country where owning one’s own destiny is the norm gives sovereignty to the people, not the government.

The next generation. A boy helps his father repair their Oldsmobile.

The other important lesson from Cuba is the importance of allowing entrepreneurs to operate, because entrepreneurs provide goods and services that people want, and even those that people need. We shouldn’t cherry pick how we define an entrepreneur—an entrepreneur can be anybody, working alone or working together with others, who solves problems for people. We glorify entrepreneurship in the US as an avenue for creating jobs, but jobs are secondary. The real benefit of entrepreneurship is the availability of more and better goods and services for a better price. An entrepreneur can have a business employing only one person—the entrepreneur—and still make a difference.

The best and captive market in the world for entrepreneurs is that market where the most basic needs are not being met, which means Cuba has become, and will continue to be, a haven for entrepreneurship in the years to come. How can we as Americans support this? I have been researching a lot into questions about owning property, importing basic things like aspirin and t-shirts, allowing for easier communication to and from Cuba, helping with language education—these are all things that people need. As America opens up to Cuba, we’re in a privileged geographical position, not to mention a cultural one, to help invest in this country.

* * *

* I changed most names and some details to protect people
** I’m still trying to verify this as it relates to Cuba-to-Cuba SMS. Was told by two people separately that it isn’t possible, but there’s nothing about it online.
*** Incidentally, if there were ever an example of the futility of embargoes and trade sanctions in order to change a regime, the Cuba embargo would be it. It clearly did nothing to change Fidel’s grip on power, and may have even extended it, by giving Fidel an excuse to continue impoverishing his people

It’s not every day I feel compelled to write a travel review, but once in a while I have an experience at a place so rewarding that I feel I owe it to the establishment to get its name out there. The fact that Kuglóf Kávézó, tucked into the passageway at Pesti Barnabás utca number 1, is less than 3 weeks old, makes me even more adamant that it still be there when I go back.

Kuglóf is small as coffee shops go, with a naturally lit interior, high wooden tables and chairs, and an intimate seating area with a sunny view of the arched passageway it calls home. Outdoor seating is also available, with a view of gorgeous Elizabeth Bridge and the Danube.

Reminiscent of a hipster Brooklyn café, Kuglóf has immediate charm. The staff is friendly and–thankfully for me–English proficient. The croissant and pastry selection is superb; all seem to be freshly baked each morning. Adding to the homely appeal of the place, the croissants are self serve. My favorites are the mini croissants which are perfectly sized for dipping. Unlike most Budapest cafés, it is open until well into the evening with a full selection, so it’s perfect for a late Sunday croissant or for getting homework done on a Monday night.

All your typical coffee shop fare is served, including an array of cool drinks (iced coffees, smoothies, etc). Their cappuccino cups are of a tapered design I’ve never seen anywhere, and even their gorgeous construction does not do justice to the coffee inside. The coffee is frothy and smooth, professionally and (I believe) hand ground.

I highly recommend the hot chocolate, made in the classic Euro-cocoa style. Available in milk and dark, the cocoa is a melted delight, served with a touch of added chocolate shavings for that chocolate-induced heart attack you always dreamed of.

It’s not often that a café gets everything right. The staff, the decor, the selection, the quality, and the view make this all a place worth visiting. It also stands in stark contrast to the opportunistically placed Café Molnár next door. Even so, I hope Molnár continues to draw tourists like flies to honey, so real gems like Kuglóf are left to the insiders. It’s worth it.

It was Thursday night and I found myself in the seizième arrondissement taking a video of my French friends taking a shot of Unicum for the first time. Their faces were distorted in pain, a look that any Unicum pusher knows so well and delights in. After our Unicum, we found ourselves at a bar at Trocadéro. We closed down the bar and had to relinquish our seats so they could be stacked and stored as we finished our drinks. Afterwards we all crashed, myself most of all after a long travel day. And so began my long weekend that was all too short in my second favorite city in the world.

Paris for all its faults is a jewel of architecture, history and culture, and there is no better reminder of this than the endless flow of tourists who clog every nook and cranny of city during summers, pouring out of Notre Dame and the Louvre and cramming the metros with their camera lenses fixed skywards and their feet tripping on the legs of cafe tables. But there are also the timeless Parisien scenes: the booksellers on the Seine, the waiters with immaculate black and white uniforms conjuring platters of foie gras and croque monsieur like magicians, the street performers, the omnipresent accordion sound drifting in the air.

Friday my host, Jonathan, went to work so I went to the left bank, to Shakespeare and Company. It is not the same Shakespeare and Company Hemingway fondly remembered in A Moveable Feast, but it is at least half a century old and filled with books and tourists to read the books. The reading room upstairs was nearly empty when I went upstairs and finished A Moveable Feast looking out on Notre Dame across the river. It became the fifth Hemingway I have read, making Hemingway one of my most frequented authors. I picked up a copy of Green Hills of Africa while there, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. It seemed appropriate to purchase the books at their authors’ inspirational nexus. Friday night I met up with Jonathan and he took me to shabbat dinner with his cousin and his girlfriend and two other friends. Aside from the opening kiddush, the dinner was like any other and flowed with wine and rapid conversation. Malheureusement my French competency is not what it might be and I found it very difficult to participate at speed with my hosts, who were gracious enough to include me in English several times in the conversation. I found that it was much easier for me to understand the flow of conversation than to speak, and although many things slipped past me–notably all the joke punchlines–I was able to understand the humor of dialogue and participate as such. Jonathan and I had discussed my libertarianism earlier that day, and he brought it up at the dinner table which led to a short interchange about the relative merits of American-style individualism and French-style communitarianism. Jonathan and his friends are in the upper strata, more or less, of French society, so it was interesting to hear their take on French society and what they expected from the future. Jonathan’s cousin and his girlfriend are moving to Singapore, and Jonathan will be trying to move to the US as soon as possible. Critics of American exceptionalism will often point out how much better various indicators are in other countries in the world, especially Europe, but I found it revealing how desperately these young people in this particular class are trying to flee France, a country that, after all, has been very good to them and their families. I heard many times how America was the greatest country in the world. I also found it interesting one passionate defense of French socialism by a guest at the table, in light of the fact that most of the people she knows are trying to flee French socialism as soon as possible–and the new 75% tax imposed by François Hollande doesn’t help the situation. At one point the subject of pig latin came up and I became the de facto educator of pig latin at the table. My French friends had never heard of pig latin before, and were quite amused in their attempts to speak it despite their many errors. Michael, our host, had particular trouble translating the “ay” sound, instead using “ah,” much to the amusement of his girlfriend. One thing I noticed, being a passive observer of dinner conversation without the ability to participate, was the flow of conversation topics. As the proverbial fly on the wall I was able to follow the conversation from elephants to caves to attics to rumors to politics to airplanes to consulting to business to chocolate and that was 4 hours. I found the simultaneous attempt to follow the conversation and understand French and drink wine to be quite exhausting, but worth the experience. It has only motivated me more to learn French much much better, a promise I made to Jonathan and I intend to keep. Friday night we crashed and slept in the next day.

Saturday Jonathan and I met up with Michael for petit déjeuner where we had croissants and hot chocolate and toast with honey and orange juice. Michael unfortunately is recovering from a fractured shin, so he is on crutches and our walking range was limited. We drove into the city and parked on Île de la Cité. As we got out of the car, someone across the Seine decided to dive in for an afternoon swim. He paddled around in the river for a couple minutes before a patrol boat fished him out. We crossed the bridge and descended upon Paris Plage, a new initiative whereby a “beach” has been built on the formerly paved bank of the Seine. This beach is one lane of traffic wide and is basically a sand pit. Many children play with sand pails and parents bring beach chairs, but this is not a beach. I learn that Paris Plage was met with derision as a project, both for its cost and its disruption of summer traffic, which we got a taste of on our drive down the right bank. It seems pretty silly in retrospect, but I suppose enough people are enjoying themselves on this “beach” to make it worthwhile. The bank of the Seine also hosted a disappointingly awful dance trio who inexplicably drew a huge crowd. After our brief excursion to the beach, we went back to the seizième and got sushi takeout for a picnic. We picked up Michael’s and Jonathan’s girlfriends and all ended up at the park with our sushi and fruit picnic. More French was spoken. More English was spoken with me than before. Wine was flowing. After the picnic we went to the cinema on Champs-Élysées and saw Starbuck, a Quebecois movie about a sperm donor who, 20 years later, finds out he has 500 children that want to meet him. It was an endearing movie but not that good. It was in Quebecois French without subtitles. I understood most of it. After the movie we relaxed at home for a bit before going out for a party. The party was good. I learned that in France, many people learn English using textbooks starring a character named Brian. The question is posed to the students, “Where is Brian?” to which the students respond, “Brian is in the kitchen.” It thus became imperative to take a picture of Brian in the kitchen. We did. The party lasted until 5am. I had a train to catch at 9am. I crashed. The French stayed out for two more hours.

Paris was cathartic for me. This was my sixth time in the city. No reason to do all the tourist stuff, although when I arrived I did walk for two hours from Châtelet to Rue de Belles Feuilles while on a conference call with Ustream, which my phone bill will be none too happy about. But on the walk I passed by the Louvre, across the Pont des Arts, down Saint-Germain, across Les Invalides, to the Champ de Mars and around the Eiffel Tower to Trocadéro, and the next day I walked from Rivoli across Île de la Cité and Notre Dame to Shakespeare and Company, through the Latin Quarter to Pantheon and Jardin Luxembourg, and finally to Odéon and Place Saint-Michel. So you could say I did most of the things tourists would do, although at this point I can do it without a map and I have a sense of ownership over my route. Paris is my city, or so I hope it to be one day. But the most important part about being in Paris for me was the soul of the city, the jazz music in the air, the smell of crêpes and waffles, the sweeping memories of bygone eras: kings, princes, all the wars and republics, the settling of the Seine, the height of power, the darkness of occupation, and through it all the constant beat of Gallic optimism. There is no other place where roads and history and life intersect on the same metaphysical plane: past, present, future, left, right and center, night, day and eternity.

The next day I took the train to London at 9 in the morning. The Eurostar train was high speed and whipped through the chunnel at breakneck speed, leaving us with our ears popped on both ends. London is gearing up for the Olympics, but I saw none of it, opting to catch a train to Oxford to see my good friend for lunch, before turning around and coming back to Hampton Court Palace where my family rented the Fish Court to have a reunion, 16 years later, of our first family vacation. It’s a full week of vacation for them, but I was only there for the night. Dinner was at a new Lebanese restaurant in the town, and dessert was a bottle of Graham’s port bottled 1912–its 100 year anniversary. It is hard to imagine how much different the world was when every person who made that bottle was alive and well and optimistic. It has been only 100 years, a blink in history, but an eternity for a young mortal trying to imagine how dead and buried he will be when 2112 rolls around. In the last century there were two world wars, three brutal totalitarianisms, the transformative liberalization of the global economy, the internet and the politics of interconnectivity, a cold war and a space age. It is hard to imagine what will happen in the next 100 years. The port was delicious and perfectly preserved.

At 5 in the morning on Sunday I got up and began my trek back to Budapest, with a Eurostar train from London to Paris Nord, the RER B from Gare du Nord to Charles de Gaulle, the EasyJet from Charles de Gaulle to Budapest T2, and finally a taxi to work where I finished out the work day with 2 meetings and a great dinner at Klassz in Budapest with my Ustream colleagues. I was reflecting during a mad dash through Waterloo station on Sunday to make the train to Hampton how travel is the one thing I am truly exceptional at: making ambitious plans, improvising, learning by direct experience, catching the trains on time but also lingering at the memorable and ephemeral moments along the way, and never having too much of a plan in order to avoid disrupting the discovery. Nothing I have ever done or will do comes close to the experience of making it from point A to point B in as interesting and unique a route as possible, with as many things as possible accomplished along the way.

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb is just what it sounds like: a museum that documents the story of broken relationships and lost loves. It is a small exhibition, with only 5 or 6 rooms, but its size is reflective of its intimacy, as guests come from all over the world–it’s a traveling exhibition as well–to gaze on the fragmented pieces of private romances.

On the informational cards accompanying each piece in the exhibition are not the contributor’s name, as in many museums, but the place and timespan of the relationship. Belgrade, 1993 – 1997. Singapore, 2000 – 2001. Rome, 1975 – 1985. Some of these relationships whose stories we pour over had lasted for one month; other, 30 or more years, but they all have something in common: a deep and intimate romantic connection broken forever. The skeletal remains of these lost loves are what are on display here: ordinary objects of life marked forever: a house key, a doll, a pair of boots, a dress, a bag of olive pits. These objects carry no meaning on their own, but are infused with emotional power due to the turmoil they have inflicted. Some of them are objects of devotion. Others, objects of betrayal. They all share their stories.

One card next to a faded silver watch:

The first time my ex told me he loved me, he took off my watch and pulled the pin out to mark the time he said it. After that I could never bring myself to push it back in or wear it again. But if I had known then that he was really only ever going to steal my time, I would have pushed it back in and walked away instead of waiting too many years for my life to start again.

September 2002 – May 2005
Bloomington, Indiana.

The stories are shared of hope, of pain, of joy and of suffering. There is a red coat given by a man to his girlfriend before she left him and returned it. There is a love letter that was never sent, and upon the breakup was glued to a glass mirror and then shattered. There is a broken window from a fight. A pair of fuzzy handcuffs. A head massager. A love note from an Italian to an American with a map of Italy drawn freehand with places to visit together.

Some of the stories are long, other short. Some are personal to the point of embarrassment, others abstract and vague. Some are bitter. A frisbee is labeled “Darling, should you ever get a ridiculous idea to walk into a cultural institution like a museum for the first time in your life, you will remember me. At least have a good laugh (the only thing you could do on your own).” One exhibition is a filmed testimony of a very old Croatian woman recounting her 1942 love affair with a Serbian soldier during the war. Afterwards, he got married and she emigrated to America, but she turned a gold coin he gave her as a present into her wedding ring. I wonder if her husband ever knew. The exhibit mentioned he had died 20 years ago. One exhibit reads, “This key to your apartment was one of the many small, spontaneous gifts you gave me. I never knew why you never wanted to sleep with me, until you died of AIDS.”

It is appropriate that few visitors to this museum are in couples. The individual women and men scanning the exhibits do so silently and alone. Perhaps nothing brings the power of the museum into greater relief than the contrast between the shattered fragments of relationships past and the people who absorb them, criticize them, cry over them, and pick up and move on. The shattered mirrors and formerly embraced gifts are symbols of every relationship, and thus touch every witness to their former pain or glory. They tell a specific story but a universal one, and might relieve the victims of recently dissolved romances that they are not alone.

I have been to many a culture museum in my travels, in virtually every capital. A museum of Welsh culture. Of Mongolian culture. Of Chinese culture. Of Peruvian culture. I am not a fan of culture museums. Far from emphasizing the unique, the culture museum plays on romanticist and cliché notions of the society: the “typical” dress, the “traditional” songs. By compartmentalizing the “unique” aspects of a culture, the culture museum specifically excludes the inherent diversity in all cultures, the pull of the past against the future, the mixing of old and new, and the inevitable mingling of peoples and ethnicities that does not lend itself to clean cut notions of “tradition.” Culture museums bring out the worst in identity politics. Instead from extolling the virtues of a society, they often betray its limitations, for the story of a culture cannot possibly be complete without the convergence of arbitrarily defined cultures from others, and yet the museum attempts to make the cultural narrative a circumscribed ethnography, a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end. Real culture is not frozen in time; real culture is in the now. The immigrants selling water bottles at the entrance to the culture museum say more about the culture of the society than the museum itself.

What makes the Museum of Broken Relationships precisely the opposite of a culture museum is that it seeks to tell a real story, a story unbounded by arbitrary or historically accidental divisions. The story is shared by most, if not all, cultures. Thus, the Museum of Broken Relationships might be the best cultural museum in Zagreb, if not the world, because it tells a story of culture that transcends the traditional bounds of culture. This “super-culture” is more important than the individual ethnographic vignettes that pose as tradition in culture museums around the world. Says the museum, “Our societies oblige us with our marriages, funerals, and even graduation farewells, but deny us any formal recognition of the demise of a relationship, despite its strong emotional effect.” The museum is a testament to our shared human emotional roller coaster, the moments where all seems lost and sometimes the smallest slights provoke the strongest feelings of resentment or, sometimes, reminiscent fondness. And it is unlike any other museum in that the story it tells is not a story of the past, not a segmented or forgotten moment in time. The story it tells is a story of the present, and a story of the future.

The weekend started off with a disappointment. Although my brother and I had made the necessary reservations in advance, the Ukrainian authorities unceremoniously cancelled our planned trip to Chernobyl. The good news is, once we were over this initial letdown, the weekend could only get better.

I find that emerging economies are the most interesting places to visit, precisely because the rules of order (I would say over-order) we have become used to in the United States and Europe are nonexistant. The first sign of this unorderness for me was the “taxi” from the airport, which was a normal, unmarked car called up by the hostel to pick me up. Unmarked, and ready to drive me 30 minutes to downtown without a seatbelt.

After checking in at the hostel (Marshall is working there for the summer) it was already 11pm so we went across the street to a bar where we ordered beer, pizza and hookah, normal fare for that place. Then, before putting away the menus, I realized that there was an entire menu just for sushi. It seemed odd to me that a pizza, beer and hookah place would serve sushi, but Marshall told me that apparently, the Ukrainians are obsessed with sushi. I would soon find out that “obsessed” is an understatement. There is sushi on every menu in ever restaurant in the city.

While we were sitting outside eating pizza, we were fortunate to witness another incident. Across the street, a SUV was pulled over by a cop car. One cop got out and went to the window and started talking to the driver, a young woman in her 20’s. After a couple minutes of talking, the cop stepped away from the vehicle and looked back at the road, where he flagged down another car. The second car was not speeding–and we know, because we saw several speeders go by in the short time we were there–but it pulled over anyway and stopped a couple parking spaces in front of the first car. Meanwhile, the girl in the first car had gotten out and went to sit in the police car with the other officer. We could clearly see money changing hands from our vantage point. Then, she got out, went back to her car, and drove off. Evidently, the second car was in the process of bribing the cops as well.

Marshall tells me that cops taking bribes is about as normal as it gets in Ukraine. When he was in Odessa, he and his friend were stopped for drinking in public (in reality, for talking English in public) and had handcuffs dangled in front of them before one of the cops took him into an alley to negotiate a bribe of about $30. Such is how justice works in Ukraine.

On Saturday, we walked around the city, covering a good third of the city center. It’s a decently large city, with normal city things (shops, parks, the Dnieper, and churches, lots of churches). The day was largely uneventful, although we did visit the deepest metro station in the world, which took two escalators over at least seven minutes to get to the bottom of, and we met some heavily accented eastern Europeans who said they lived in Hartford, Connecticut.

For lunch, we got traditional Ukrainian food–sushi at Yellow Sea, a restaurant decked out like the Japan stall at Disney World. The exclusively white staff wore ninja headbands and kimonos. The walls were ornamented with Chinese characters. There was, of course, the obligatory water-wall. The waiter poured tea from a 15-inch spout. And when the sushi came, it was on a wooden boat in classic junk style. Surprisingly, the sushi was delicious, and to my delight, the yellow tail was actually fresh. The Ukrainians really like their sushi.

We got back to the hostel late afternoon and we took a siesta. I powered through the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapágos, which was alright, and napped for a bit. Then we met up with a bunch of other hostel goers. There was a girl from California who was teaching English in Kiev. A Polish stoner from Krakow. The hsotel owner, whose name escapes me. An Irish guy and an English guy who just met while travelling over their love of football. And there was Kevin, a Northwestern student we had met the night before and with whom we had shared pizza, hookah and beer.

We started the evening by trying to get a “Taxi,” which I soon found out involved flagging down cars on the street and asking to pay for a ride somewhere. Apparently hitchhiking is not only common in Kiev, it’s the only way to get around reliably. We found that all “Taxis” were such glorified hitches. Our car was driven by an African immigrant who agreed to drive us to our destination for $4. On the way, he had Lady Gaga pumping through the sound system on repeat.

That destination was a bar, “Room 6,” which was in the basement of an old hospital or sanitarium. The bar is unmarked but evidentally enough know its reputation. We had steaks which went for $5 a pop–excellent meat–and had a beer while watching the pregame. (One of the reasons Marshall is there–and why I wanted to visit–was because the EuroCup is happening right now in Ukraine.) The bar is staffed by “nurses” and “doctor” bartenders. One of the specialty shots they do is called the “Straightjacket,” where they put you in a straightjacket and lie you in the lap of a large-breasted nurse who spoons you a drink.

Marshall tells Kevin and me that we will be spared the “Straightjacket,” but we have to do a “Flaming Head” shot instead. They take us to the bar and seat us, and strap a World War II helmet on our heads. They then dab lighter fluid on each helmet, light it on fire, and start blowing whistles. They take three shots–red, white and blue–and successively bang them on our heads to activate the latent carbon, then blow whistles as we shoot them. While one is going down empty, the next is being banged on our flaming heads. Then, when all three are empty, they take a beer keg and bang that on our heads, too. Then they extinguish the flames and the whole bar erupts in applause. The whole ordeal lasted maybe two minutes, but it was memorable…and somewhere, I’m sure, there’s a video. We then went to another bar to watch the game, but it was pretty empty, so we went to the FanZone instead.

There were no games held in Kiev this weekend, but the “FanZone” attempts to give you the game experience. It is in the center of town decked out with jumbotrons, and thousands of spectators gather in drunken tidal pools to cheer on the matches. Ukraine had long since been eliminated. Tonight was Spain vs. France, and it was a boring, boring game. About two hours later, Spain had won 2-0 and the night was still young. Much jubilation and reverie ensued–indeed, the Ukranians are well suited for their drunken reputation. I have never been so impressed by the amount of alcohol that can be dispensed of by a population. I think I ended up getting back to the hostel at 4am, although my phone and only timekeeper had long since died. Some point in the evening, we went to a run-of-the-mill coffee shop and had sushi. The Ukrainians really like their sushi.

In all, it was a perfectly fine experience exploring a new city like Kiev. We could have gone to Chernobyl, which would have been amazing, but I guess it just leaves something for me to do when I go back. I also know now that if I want good sushi, Kiev’s only a short distance away.

I was reading my friend Luca’s blog post today about language and memories of our home stay in HaMakuya, Limpopo way back in 2009. It was an awesome experience, and I have many fond memories of our host family and the various escapades of the children, who shall forever remember me as the white dude with the beard who couldn’t get the drum rhythms quite right. But speaking of language, in Venda, the word for hello is different for men and women. The women say Aa, which means “hello,” but the men declare Nda!, which literally means “I am a lion.”

This his how it usually happens:

Man: I am a lion!
Woman: And a good day to you too, Sir.

In my time in HaMakuya, I witnessed the interplay between Nda! and Aa several dozen times. Sometimes the interaction was between two men, sometimes between a man and one or several woman, but interestingly enough, never from one woman to another–the household where we were staying was made up of mostly women of several generations, and they did not exchange Aa‘s as far as I could tell. But as soon a man entered the conversation with the declarative “Nda!,” the women would always respond with “Aa,” accompanying it with a floor-level bow.

It is a challenge to modern notions of gender justice when you witness an old woman cowtowing to a young boy in casual conversation. It is also difficult, as a foreigner, to let this situation play out without any judging the society based on moral incongruity. One situation I saw that was particularly memorable was a boy who was just hitting puberty–maybe thirteen years old–walk into the household full of women, and without breaking his stride declare “Nda!” The women, in response, all hit the floor with “Aa.” What was striking about it was the level of bravado in his greeting: chest puffed out, chin lifted, with his voice intoned with confidence. It was surprising to see this level of arrogance, especially in light of his smallish frame. But for men and boys, the experience of Nda! must be imbued with an extreme level of self-righteousness, as it is always an opportunity to assert one’s dominance at the beginning of every conversation. I suppose you have to give the men some credit; Whereas most men around the world must assert their masculinity in more subtle ways, the men of Limpopo can directly and forcefully declare their lion-hood to all company present without social awkwardness or shame.

The women, of course, are not ignorant to the peculiarity of this custom, and thus when a man walks into a room and declares “I am a lion,” it is not unusual hear the voices of the women dripping with irony as they assume their bows, often elongating their greeting with a sarcastic “Aaaaaahhhhh.” At one interaction, I could have sworn I heard a woman say “Uh huh,” and she might as well have. The tradition of Aa is clearly not taken very seriously by the women of HaMakuya.

So while a man hears:

Man: I am a lion!
Woman: And a good day to you too, Sir.

A woman hears:

Man: I am a lion!
Woman: Sure you are, big guy.

That this very basic greeting, probably the cornerstone of conversation, can be used wildly differently depending on the gender of the speaker, speaks volumes about the role of language in society. Words are the building blocks of ideas. So when an entire Venda-speaking population communicates everyday greetings with this type of built-in sexism, one has to euthyphroically ask: is the culture sexist because people say hello in this manner, or do people say hello in this manner because they are sexist?

When girls are taught at a young age to bow and submit to their male peers–when they see their grandmothers doing the same to their little brothers–they learn to assume the position of inferiority in a quite literal manner. There is no ambiguity in the deep bow, no question of whose authority is present in a room when the first speaker declares he is a lion. And as far as I can find, Aa has no correlative meaning (such as “I am a dove”). It just means Aa. The persistence of this tradition in the face of modern gender liberation is fascinating–especially since the women of Limpopo are no strangers to gender liberation.

For in HaMakuya, the women attend school and take night classes in business (we talked to a group of them coming home from school once). The women run the households and educate their children. The women do all the farming and cooking. The men, as far as I can tell, have very few responsibilities. They have political power in the community, they handle the cattle and fetch firewood, and in the rare case where employment is available, they work, usually in the nearby city. When it comes to household finances, women make purchases for house and home and education, whereas the men, far as I can tell, spend their money on beer. It was very apparent in our household who was in charge and who wasn’t.

Yet when the men arrive late at night from the bar and declare “I am a lion,” they are greeted customarily by all the women of the household, who put down their cooking spoons and brooms and scythes and kindling. “Aaaahh,” the women say, falling to their weary knees, bowing to the freshly swept floor, “We salute you, Lion. Now we need to get back to work.”

Sunday mornings are silent in Vienna, punctuated only by the dull hum of a tram or the chirping of birds in the hundreds of parks in the city. The wind coming out of the Danube valley rushes down the wide boulevards, amplifying their desolateness. I am in Burgengarten, looking at the backside of the Hofburg palace with HIS • AEDIBUS • ADHAERET • CONCORS • POPULORUM • AMOR emblazoned in Latin across the frieze. As far as European palaces go, Hofburg is pretty disappointing. Tour groups wander in and out of the grounds, following their herders with disconnected interest. One group removed itself even more from human contact by donning headphones which were all connected to the tour guide’s microphone. This group can’t even interact with each other in person, let alone the drone at the front of the pack leading them through a sanitized history lesson with practiced monotony. In Michaelerplatz, horse-drawn carriages shuttle tourists around the roundabout. Students are dragged by invisible leashes through the grounds as their eyes remain fixated on their phones.

I got in yesterday evening, after deciding on a whim to visit this city I once visited ten years ago. There hasn’t been much change, and my feelings about it remain the same. It is sprawling, scrubbed down, impersonal, and boring. Classical German romantic façades make carbon copies of each other on street after street, with the occasional rusted dome popping up above the fray. When I got in, I took the metro right to Landßrase where I thought, mistakenly, there would be something to see or do. Instead I was among residential complexes, so I decided to walk to the Danube, not anticipating my journey across less than 10% of the city would take two hours.

On the way there, I saw a park that would be a convenient shortcut to the water. The door was labeled “Hundezone,” and I saw a couple dogs inside with their owners, but thought nothing of it. I walked into the park, and almost immediately the dogs, who were calm and playful before, started barking angrily and going for me. I made it halfway up the hill before I had one dog right on me, with another dog, that came up to my chest, sniffing at me aggressively. The owner was yelling in German, and I couldn’t tell if he was yelling at the dogs or at me. I didn’t feel very safe, and he wasn’t doing much to dispel my fears, as he just stood there and let his dogs threaten violence on me. I’m glad I don’t understand German because I don’t want to know what he was saying. Was he egging them on? His family was picnicking 30 feet away, and they were watching the spectacle but didn’t seem to pay it much mind. Meanwhile, I’m about to have my limbs torn off by at least five dogs, none of whom were nicer than your average French waiter. I quickly turned tail and got out of the dog zone, which I thought might have led to a misunderstanding. Maybe it was specifically for ill trained dogs? But I couldn’t find anything out about it online later. By the time I reached the Danube, the sun was just about to start going down and I realized, against all intuition, the Danube is an urban wasteland in Vienna. There is an office park across the way, one high span bridge every two miles, and nothing but bike paths along the shore. It took an hour to walk back to the nearest metro stop.

One thing I did notice on my walk through the back streets of Vienna was the abundance of graffiti. I feel you can tell a lot about a society through its rogue artwork, and it is not surprising that a land where certain thoughts of an Aryan nature are not permitted by law, the Nazification of the urban landscape would be close at hand. Vienna does not disappoint. It is one of those cruel ironies of free speech that the less free the speech, the more in bursts to the surface, and in this case, it is clear how the fringe (at least I hope the fringe) of Austrian society finds its outlet, how the stormy, angry undercurrent shows through cracks in the stony, impersonal, buttoned-up façade of the city.

After checking into my hostel (itself far on the outskirts of the city with a gorgeous view of the valley), I took the bus back into town and checked out a couple of the popular metro stops. I once met a girl in Moscow in 2010 who told me her philosophy on travel was to “go where the party was at,” so I hopped onto the subway and got off at where the most people got off, in this case Stefansplatz. This was a charming area, with a cathedral, several open squares in close succession, with music, restaurants and fountains sharing one crowded space on the cobblestones. I ended up in a bar talking with high schoolers from an American school in Vienna, and at one point shots of lemon vodka got passed around.

I hopped on the metro again and went to Schwedenplatz, where I was told there would be “an assortment of good and bad places.” I don’t know what good places there were to be had. It was worse that Wrigleyville in Chicago for its drunkenness and worse than Las Vegas for grittiness. I was glad to hop back on the train and go to Thaliaßrase where I was told there would be a series of arcades under the train tracks with bars and clubs. There were, with Viennese and foreigners mixing in an orgy of popular music, booze and lights. The party capital of Austria is no different from the party capital of Anywhere…in the cities of the world, all humans party the same.

After getting back to my hostel, I met a couple from Mexico City doing a tour in Europe on their way to Budapest, and a couple from Arizona doing a tour in the other direction. Hostels are one of those rare places where you are always destined to meet people with interesting stories, shared experiences, and there is always an element of fate. Every day the crowd changes, and thus every day new possibilities about who you can meet anywhere in the world. In one night’s stay at a hostel I made new “friends” in Canada, Mexico, and Arizona. My new “friends” from Canada were interesting. They were a couple from Vancouver Island who lived on an organic dairy farm. I asked them if they ate organic in Europe, and they said that ignorance was bliss. The guy, Jeremy, said there were two kinds of non-organic contaminants: crop-specific, which are added by farmers deliberately to their crops (and can be chosen out by conscientious consumers) and environmental, which affect all crops in the form of air, soil and water contaminants, which he was more concerned about. I found the distinction interesting because it’s basically a choice between free choice and neighborhood effects, always an interesting problem in economics.

Which brings me back to Burgengarten. The “free” wifi is spotty at 1 KB/s max, clearly a tragedy of the commons. Every family in the park has 2 kids, one boy and one girl. No one raises their voice above a whisper. Every dog is football sized and on a leash. The grass is immaculate. The park is square and the fountain in the pond makes perfect ripples which radiate outwards rhythmically. It is the same feeling you get throughout this city. The subways and trams and busses arrive the second they are supposed to and are cleaned by hand so they glisten, even in the underworld. Viennese pedestrians wait for red lights at empty intersections. Every cobblestone in this city is in perfect place with its perfect purpose, although that purpose remains, as so many things in this city, beneath the surface. I’m fairly certain that no one here poops.

Yet even with the concerted effort for utopian sameness, there are signs of decay in the republic. Scratched paint at the bus stops. Public garbage bags stretched open. Puddles left undrained in the road. The air is stale, the food has been bland and the people have been mildly entertaining at best. It has copied the cultural milieu of Germany with none of its work ethic, proud history and heritage, or national heroes. There is an undercurrent of national arrogance, reminding me of that old joke about Austria: “The Austrians have only accomplished two things: to convince the world that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Viennese.” In short, I remain, as before, underwhelmed with what Vienna has to offer.

So being in Mongolia has been a bit of an affirmation of Friedman economics for me, not that I had such a problem with them before but Mongolia takes the models to such an extreme that it provides a willing test subject and performs very well.

We pulled into Ulaanbaatar (UB) by train at about 6 in the morning and we got off with a bunch of Mongolians from the north (we were the only car coming from Russia, read: Westerners), who all got off with various barrels and boxes and other goods they were presumably bringing to market. UB is a giant, sprawling city that has literally grown out of nowhere since independence in 1990. The Soviets built some housing and some government buildings, but post-1990 the city has been a conglomeration of impromptu homes from immigrants from the countryside. Our guide, Ganz, met us at the train station and we right away got something to eat and then started our 5-hour drive to the south desert to spend the night in a yurt with a nomad family. Ganz explains to us that the city has doubled in population in the last 10 years, and in the next 10 will double again. More interestingly, he says that 10 years ago there was no word in Mongolia for “traffic jam”–in other words, the growth of the conglomeration has outpaced the construction of infrastructure. We leave the city and less than 10 minutes outside of it there is an open steppe…literally miles and miles of empty land with an occasional yurt and herds of sheep, goat, cows, horses, and even camels, every once in a while. The massiveness of the land compared to habitation is hard to describe. In a 5 hour drive from the biggest city in Mongolia, we passed 2 villages on the road (there’s only one paved road from the city south), and saw maybe 5 people apart from that. In a country of 3 million people, 1.5 million live in UB and the rest in a countryside stretching 600,000 square miles—thats 2 people per square mile. So you can imagine how empty most of the land is.

When we’re in the car during the 5 hour trip, I start asking Ganz about the land, how people buy land, what the role of the government/taxation is, etc. Of course I’m thinking summer home/real estate. He told me that no one owns any of the land, except in UB where you have to have permits to build. I asked him if I could build a fence anywhere I wanted on the land, and call it my own, and he said theoretically I could, but no one does that. Why not? Well, 30% of Mongolians still are nomadic herders, and move 4 times year with the seasons to herd their flocks and provide meat, dairy, skins, etc for their needs and sell to others. The economy of Mongolia in 1920 was 95% herding and 5% other (manufacturing, etc), but the Soviets, to their credit, started a centralized system of education, governance, and industrialization which led to 30% of herders today, and within 10 years probably 15% of Mongolians will be herders. To encourage the “Traditional” Mongolian lifestyle, the government subsidizes herding, essentially, by not requiring the nomads to pay taxes. As a result, a fair number of herders still exist, but they still, if they can, go to UB or another city and pitch their yurts on the outskirts looking for jobs. You can see in UB, the further outside the center you go, the higher the ratio of temporary (yurt) housing to permanent housing, as it is apparent that the city is a very new, very fast growing, conglomeration as people move in from the countryside to find jobs.

So I had a couple questions for Ganz, some of which he answered and some of which he didn’t. First, I wanted to know how much land cost in Mongolia, and his answer suggested that it didn’t cost anything, but you have to pay taxes if you have permanent claim to any land. I figured that in a place where land was a nearly unlimited resource, it essentially had no value, and no one felt that they owned any land except in places, like UB, where land was in competition. In other words, within the same country you can see the extremes of land ownership and value (the city) contrasted with the extremes of non-land ownership and value (the countryside), based on the same basic economic principle. Foreigners can go to Mongolia and pay the government $50/year per hectare to “own” land–although the government only allows “leases” for foreigners. The government thus extracts revenue on the valueless land (is this right?) through taxation. So that was interesting.

We spent the afternoon and night with the nomad family, who spoke no English but Ganz translated. One of them asked at what age in the US do we learn how to ride horses, which I found amusing–horses, to Mongolians, are like cars in the US, it’s a right of passage to be a good rider. The kids in the countryside start riding at age 5. The business of this nomad family was herding, like all other nomads, although, as Ganz explained, they are more successful than most. They have an above-average number of animals (2 or 3 hundred) and sell surplus meat, dairy and wool, making money to buy provisions, more animals, and a cool satelite TV hookup in their yurt which gets 18 channels. They have 3 children, 2 of whom talked to us about wanting to move to the city when they finish school and get a job in UB…their parents support them. The only reasons the parents haven’t done it is because they have no skill set outside of herding that they could sell in a labor market, like many of the unskilled laborers who go to UB every year to find jobs. This family also supplements their income from hosting tourists like us. So for herders, they have an above-average income. What I found interesting was that their “lifestyle”–which you could really call a job–existed, as Ganz said, for them and for their own. They did not have ambitions toward stable production, or a desire to make five times as much money staying in one place, settling down and doing a western ranching model. I asked Ganz why, and didn’t get a straightforward answer, but my guess is that with the government subsidizing nomadic herding, there’s no reason for people to do anything to cover expenses aside from their basic needs. The greater needs of the economy aren’t being met.

Which brings me to my ultimate surprise: In this country of 5 million animals for 3 million people, 70% of meat is imported! That tells you that Mongolia isn’t producing at the capacity it should, and it has ultimately to do with the unwillingness of people with a herding skillset to setlle down in a production-oriented industry like ranching. Why is this? Ganz told me that some farmers, in particular, have started to adopt western crop models and have been increasing their yields and their wealth–clearly the stationary farming model is more productive. Why haven’t herders realized the stationary herding (ranching) model? Certainly, if I told my ranching friend in Montana that he could move his ranch to Mongolia for one tenth of the price, hire ten times as many herders and quadruple his profits, he would jump at that opportunity. Why hasn’t a clever nomad decided to undertake such a ranching model? And spare me the romance of the noble nomad, loving the culture of the herd and embracing glorious Mongolian culture. Clearly most herders or their children, when given a choice, choose to move to UB and get a job.

I haven’t figured out the answer yet, but Ganz speculated that eventually there will be ranches and the herding model will stabilize. It helped, he said, that two years ago there was a giant animal blight and 20% of animals in Mongolia died–he said it was a tragedy, but ultimately proved that nomadic herding is unsustainable and helped to move people to establish sustainable careers. Ganz is a bit right wing, and has his own tourism business with 8 employees and makes, by his estimation, a middle class wage. His parents were nomads, but he went to the city after school and learned English, eventually becoming a tour guide. He’s quite the Reaganite as well, which is humorous. His Uncle makes and sells ornate jewelry and is pretty good at it.

When we came back to UB, we discovered the raw growth of the city–how traffic laws aren’t enforced because no one understands them, how the biggest building in UB is still empty because they built it crooked and couldn’t install an elevator, how everything is either Soviet-era ugly or under construction, but there’s a beauty to the city in its spontaneity.

Ganz estimates that by 2020, only 5% of Mongolians will be nomadic herders, a complete reversal from 100 years ago. This, I believe, is the ultimate affirmation of the idea that efficiency in the economy will be reached despite the attempt to subsidize a different economy, because people ultimately adapt and move toward different industries. I guess the biggest mystery to me, right now, is why these “unskilled” nomads don’t adapt herding to a sedentary model, where they can still herd but can make five times as much money doing so. Perhaps, when the romance of moving to the big city subsides, many former herders will take their education and go back to the countryside, creating a new “traditional” ranching economy that is more efficient and will ultimately bring more wealth to themselves and the economy.

These are not coherent thoughts but just my rants and musings. Anyway, what do you think?

So we’ve been consistently on the road for the last couple days and we’re now settled in Cape Town. I’ll give a brief account of what happened in the past two days.

On the morning of the second we caught our shuttle with Michael to Windhoek. It was the typical 5-hour drive, nothing very eventful. We stopped at the same rest stop for biltong (basically jerky) on the way. We rode back with the Second Girls. We arrived early enough to do some shopping, especially for luggage, and Codrin wanted to look at some masks at a mall we had been to. The shopping mall, where our favorite Mugg & Bean is, turned out to be where we saw the strangest sight we’ve seen so far: A group of native Namiba women, bare breasted, lathered in orange makeup, replete with traditional jewelry and with their babies wrapped around the nape of their backs, walking through the shopping mall with plastic shopping bags. We ate at Mugg & Bean, and then Ioana went off back to the hostel and Codrin and I went to the casino to play some more blackjack.

That night the plan was to go to dinner at a Cameroon restaurant but we ended up lounging around the hostel until everything was closed so we just drank a bit and went to bed. In the morning Michael picked us up to go to the airport. The Windhoek airport is a charming airport in the middle of the shrublands. There is nothing in sight of the airport, and it takes 30 minutes to get there from Windhoek. We had some trouble with our bags; we were 30kg overweight between the three of us and had to pay a lot to get our bags onboard. The bureaucracy was terrible, which was surprising considering we haven’t really had any problems yet in that department. We had to check our bags first, then go to a separate office and pay, get a receipt and go back to make sure our bags got on the plane, but the receipt printing took forever because the woman didn’t know the computer, and long story short we went through security 10 minutes before boarding. But as it turns out, we ended up being the first people through the gate because we were rushing so much we didn’t realize we were slightly ahead of schedule. As we were taking off, it occurred to me that I had never given Namibia a second thought, and Windhoek (let alone Swakopmund) was a place I had never heard about until we started planning this trip. It makes me wonder how many other unknown, untapped jewels there are in the world for the interested traveller.

The flight to Joburg was uneventful. We got back to Doris Street around 4 and the VIP Guesthouse was closed. We called the number, and the cell phone, and no one picked up. So we had a cab, three suitcases, three backpacks, three smaller backpacks and various other bags and we really couldn’t afford to wait there. For whatever reason, even though we told Sarah we were coming that day, no one was there. So we were again homeless in Johannesburg with our bags; more than we had the first time we knocked on the gate of the VIP Guesthouse three weeks ago. We remembered there was another guesthouse down the street, so Codrin and Ioana watched the bags and I took the cab to Diamond Diggers Backpackers, where we found a room. One cab ride (and an extra 100 rand) later we got our bags into our new guesthouse, which was an enormous compound with a swimming pool, bar, jacuzzi and internet cafe. They didn’t have a three-person room, but they had an empty suite for 8 which they gave for just the three of us. Codrin went off to play poker at the casino, which is the only one we had found that had poker, and he had been itching to play all week. Ioana and I called Renata, our waitress at Rodizzo’s three weeks ago, who had offered to take us out for drinks when we were back in town. While we were waiting to be picked up, a woman approached us on the street and told us to be careful because there were black people in the neighborhood. We thanked her politely and told her our ride was just coming. Renata is apparently part of a very typical set of 18-24 year olds who live at home and still depend on their parents for rides, despite taking classes at the university. So Renata’s father picked us up and dropped us off on the other side of town at a bar called Cool Runnings where we met up with Renata’s friends–about 20 of them–some of which go to University of Cape Town and whom we’ll be hanging out with when they go back to school in February. The scene reminded me of how high schoolers get together; everyone has to go home by the end of the night, and no one lives on their own. It really disorients social life, but it also prevents the sort of partying-til-you-pass-out mentality that accompanies any college campus in the United States. We met some interesting kids at the bar; at the end of the night Ioana and I ended up paying for a bulk of our tab, which we were completely willing to do. I have a copy of the receipt in my pocket; it is 71 items long. But it was a fun, fun night. We have some friends to call up and meet when we’re back in Johannesburg.

Ioana and I got back to the hostel around 2; Codrin came in at 4 in the morning announcing that he had one 10,000 rand playing poker. Apparently his 10-hour stint at the casino had been quite profitable. In the morning, we checked out and Codrin and I went back to the casino to play poker (I ended up playing blackjack for most of the time). Ioana wanted to do some writing so she went to Nelson Mandela Square, which apparently is lovely and it’s something we’ll have to do when we go back. Around 6 we took a shuttle to the airport, flew to Cape Town, and I’m here now in the dorm room with Codrin and we are officially “Settled in.” We’ve met some people on the program but not all; everyone is quite tired from their 20-hour commutes and it makes me, for one, feel very relaxed that I’m already acclimated and “Africanized.” Go figure.

This trip has been quite expectation-shattering and interesting. I don’t really have a “conclusion” for this pseudo-journal I’ve been writing, because this really isn’t the end of anything. The Cape Town program starts tomorrow, and I really don’t know what to expect, aside from the fact that it will be scholarly. Hopefully the past couple weeks will give me a heightened perspective on the issues we will be studying, but only time will tell.

When I had finished writing the last update Ioana and I left the internet cafe and Codrin was gone. He said he was going to the shop next door but he wasn’t there, so we wandered around a bit looking for him and then went off to the cafe for another drink. It turns out Codrin had found a barber and was getting his hair cut, and when he came back looking for us we weren’t there either. Ioana and I had a quick coffee and coke and then went off to the Woermann Tower, which we were told provides an excellent panaroma of the city. The tower, built in 1905, is off of a charming courtyard and hotel where Prince Albrecht of Prussia stayed in 1907, and is the most famous building in Swakopmund. We climbed to the top and got a great 360 degree view of the city. You can look out over the ocean, then as you turn you see the ocean turn into desert, and with the ocean to your back it looks like the city is in the middle of the desert. It is a large town, too, about the size of Westport.

When we walked around the city we realized that we were essentially in Germany. Everyone spoke german, the architecture was European and colonial and on every corner there is a cafe, a beer house, or a public park. The city is perfectly manicured, and if it were not for the cars driving on the left side and the desert backdrop you would think you were in a German city. It is interesting, though; the entire downtown area was built at the turn of the century–the last century–so you see cornerstones from 1900, 1905, 1907. It occurred to me that nowhere in Germany can you find a city center built before World War I, and that adds a sort of German cultural authenticity to Swakopmund. This was the center of German colonial Africa, and remains a German city to this day. Yet at the same time, the people are unquestionably Namibian. They go to Namibian schools and participate in Namibian politics, and most importnantly, as we found out from Herman the day before, they do not regard themselves as expatriates in colonial Namibia. This is particularly surprising for us considering the whites in South Africa who we talked to who couldn’t get outof South Africa fast enough because of stagnant opportunity.

Ioana and I explored the downtown area a bit more, and found a hippie next to the tower who branded her cafe a “Soulful” place and stapled a feather to Ioana’s purchase of herbal salts and bathing oil. She asked us to come back tomorrow for a healthy smoothie with no additives. We walked to the waterfront and found another craft market where traders laid their wares on tarps and bargained with uninterested passerbys. Then we caught a cab back to the guest house.

We are staying in the Sea Breeze guesthouse, not to be confused with the Sea Wind guesthouse, right across the street. A problem we encountered in Walvis Bay, that seems to apply here as well, is the extraordinary lack of attention the owners of these guesthouses pay to their guests, to the point where you can’t find them when you need them, even when you’re checking in, and where they don’t know how to get a taxi for us to get downtown. Codrin got back to the guesthouse an hour later, and around 8 we went out again but since we couldn’t get a taxi we hitched a ride with a Batswana couple, visiting from Francistown, who were going out to dinner. They had driven to Swakopmund from Botswana, a 18-hour drive. The woman went to college at the University of Cape Town (as did Herman, actually), so we talked about Cape Town for a bit. While the man drove, he took occasional drinks from a beer he kept in his lap.

We got downtown, it was dark, and rather deserted. Codrin went to sleep early so it was just Ioana and I walking around. There isn’t much of a night life, but there are plenty of restaurants open. The problem, as The Girls told us yesterday, was that you have to get a reservation. We walked through darkened streets until we found a pizzaria next to a “Western Saloon.” We went into the saloon, complete with a door split into two halves at waist level. It was adorned with license plates from Texas, Florida, Arizona, and pretty much every state in between, with saloon-style decorations like turn-of-the-century newspaper stories about wanted outlaws and a collection of Native Americana. The place was also replete with Confederate Flags and bumper stickers. They had a collection of foreign currency, and we asked them if they had Zimbabwean and they said their Zimbabwe bills were stolen. So I gave them some of my $50,000,000 bills and the waiter brought out a sign from the men’s bathroom which read: “Zimbabwe: The only country where a roll of toilet paper, which has 72 sheets, costs $1000. It’s cheaper to change the $1000 into $100 bills, wipe your ass with 72 of them, and keep the $280 in change.” After donating our hard-earned $200 million to this Western Saloon, we were told the kitchen was closed so we could only drink. Fine with us, we figured we’d eat at the pizzaria next door after we had a beer. However, when we got to the pizzaria, it was 10 minutes after their kitchen was closed, too. Then we went to the beer house, and their kitchen had just closed as well. Luckily, there was a movie theatre across the street, so we sat down on the pedestrian street and ate dinner of concessions: Biltong, popcorn, candy, chips and iced tea. The whole meal was US$8, for two people, and filled us up really well. Even concession food: amazing.

We managed to find a cab back to the guesthouse and crashed. We slept in until 10:30, and then hightailed it downtown to have a lunch at our favorite Swakopmund cafe. I got my haircut, Codrin went to the market and Ioana is writing in her journal at the Soulful cafe next to the Woermann Tower.

New Year’s tonight! Apparently there’s a leap second being added at the end of 2008 so New Years is going to come a tick later. Have a good one!